(Rob Pegoraro)
Craiglist founder and philanthropist Craig Newmark has teamed up with Sesame Street’s Count von Count as part of a new video campaign for Newmark's Take9 project, which urges users to count to nine and "think before you click, download, or share" a new email or text message.
“I’ve been fighting online scams for 25 years,” Newmark says in one video. The Count responds, “And I have been counting for over 2,500 years!”
In another clip, the Count interrupts a woman who just received a text message with a link requesting her bank password: “Wait! Don’t click! Count!” One tell from that text: the phone number’s 81 country code, which would only make sense for US residents who maintain a bank account in Japan.
In an interview with PCMag, Newmark expands on the take-nine concept, part of a campaign he launched in October 2024 with the Aspen Institute. “The theme is that when you're approached by someone, especially if they're making it sound urgent, you’ve got to take a beat and consider if this really seems right to you,” he says. “Nine seconds is within the sweet spot of what behaviorists and so on suggest.”
So many scams prey on human anxiety, threatening dire consequences if people don’t act now, and even security experts can get fooled if the message is sufficiently well-crafted and reaches them when they’re tired or distracted.
A brief pause can give your head a chance to downshift from lizard-brain impulsiveness and bring some skepticism to bear.
Pig-butchering scams, in which a stranger pretends to befriend you and then coaxes you into putting money into a cryptocurrency scam, don’t involve that same act now urgency. But Newmark thinks the same wait-a-minute skeptical instincts that he wants to spur with Take9 can help you there as well.
Newmark warns that the pig-butchering problem is likely to get worse thanks to AI. “In the foreseeable future, the bad guys will be able to use large language models to generate that approach, to run it in real time through texting, and possibly to run it in real time using voice generation and eventually video,” he says.
Seeing this much effort put into ripping off people annoys him. “I take it personally," he says. "It pisses me off.”
Take9’s advice, doled out in snackable posts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn, also covers the usual account-security basics: Use a password manager instead of reusing passwords, enable multi-factor authentication for your important accounts, and upgrade to phishing-proof passkeys whenever possible.
Newmark wants to see tech companies do still more to protect their customers. He cites Google’s recent addition of an on-device AI model for real-time scam detection of calls and texts from numbers not in your contacts list as one good example.
“If you can give good advice regarding potential scam approaches on our phones, that solves a lot of the problem,” he says. “Because for most people, including myself, that’s our main communications device.”
Newmark says his goal is "to make it so difficult for scammers that they give up.” He adds, “Sometimes the target is something that you just can't really measure. As an engineer, I'm frustrated by that.”
Newmark expresses admiration for his puppet co-star. “He is a much better counter than I am,” he says. “Frankly, any success I've had in anything increasingly is because I outsource my social skills to people who have them, and I figure outsourcing them to the Count can only be a successful thing.”